Microsoft is set to move its Windows Azure cloud platform to a production environment stage, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, said on Tuesday morning.

"On January 1, for the first time, Windows Azure will switch to a production service for paying customers," Ozzie said at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles. Microsoft will execute its production systems and billing systems for Azure, Ozzie said.

"Tens of thousands of developers have participated in the CTP and you've made a tremendous -- a tremendous -- impact on the product," Ozzie said.

He touched on ambitions for Azure, including the ability to run Java applications via the Apache Tomcat server and introduced an Azure subsystem codenamed Dallas, which features an marketplace for public and commercial data. "Dallas makes the whole world of data better than the sum of its parts by creating a uniform discovery mechanism for data," said Ozzie. Dallas, which Ozzie described as "data as a service," now heads to a CTP phase.

"The magic of Dallas is about taking friction out of the process of discovery, exploring, and using data so you can create applications and experiences," said Dave Campbell, Microsoft technical fellow.

Dallas data feeds will be discovered via a new service called Microsoft Pinpoint.

Wordpress was introduced as a user of Azure, as was Cheezburger Network, which will host its oddlyspecific.com Web site, pertaining to strange signage, on Azure.

Microsoft also introduced a beta release of Windows Server AppFabric, providing application services for developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning the server and the cloud. AppFabric combines hosting and caching technologies formerly codenamed Dublin and Velocity with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control, formerly known as .Net Services. AppFabric technologies will be featured in Azure and Windows Server.

This story, "Microsoft sets Windows Azure production date," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.

This story, "Microsoft sets Windows Azure production date" was originally published by
InfoWorld.